Sniper one (28 page)

'Guess what, lads, Nat's agreed to spend the whole of my R&R with me. We're going down to the seaside and we're
going to have two weeks of nonstop perfect sex. Can you fucking believe it! It's more than just sex though, guys, OK? I'm really falling for her, and she really likes me too. Do you think I should introduce her to my parents yet, or is it too early, Danny?'

'Oh, er, no, I wouldn't do that just yet, Smudger. Don't you want to see your mates instead?'

'Fuck them. This is the real thing. Look, I'm not going to cut my hair down to the bone any more so I can grow it a bit longer for Nat. She loves it like that. That's OK with you, isn't it?'

It was awful. He was head over heels in love with Natalie. He had planned to spend his entire R&R with a stunning woman that only existed inside Chris and Fitz's heads. Not in their wildest dreams did they ever think they'd get him that badly. Word spread around the whole platoon about Natalie's real identity, so everyone was now having a good laugh behind poor old Smudge's back.

As the platoon commander, I did my best to stay aloof from the wind-up. It was going to end in tears sooner or later, and as the responsible one it was best I stayed out of it. But I couldn't resist having a peek in every now and then.

As his R&R date got closer, Smudge spent more and more time in the washing block perfecting the best look for Natalie. At last the day itself came, and he sorted out his best civvies for the occasion. Nat had even offered to meet him off the plane at Brize Norton.

A few of us made a deputation to Chris and Fitz.

'Look, you two, you've got to fucking tell him before he leaves. What happens when he turns up at Brize and she's not there? Chris?'

'I know, I know, Dan. We have to. I just can't think how the fuck we're going to do it.'

They decided there was no point in beating around the bush with it. In what was supposed to be Smudge's very last online conversation with Natalie before they were due to meet, Chris and Fitz chucked in the hand grenade.

This is how their last messaging went.

Smudge: 'can't wait to see you tomorrow baby. you got the instructions through from me on how to get there ok yeah?'

Natalie: 'yes i did, my little warrior. but there's just one problem.'

Smudge: 'what's that baby?'

Natalie: 'i'm not going to be there darling.'

Smudge: 'why not??'

Natalie: 'because i don't exist. this is chris and fitz in the QRF room, and it has been all along, YOU FUCKING KNOB!!!!!'

I was in the QRF room with them. Smudge was in the Internet room alone. There was silence from it for a good thirty seconds. It took a little time for what he had just read to actually sink in. Then we heard a chair hurled on the floor, a couple of screamed expletives, and the rapid thump of boots down the corridor.

Smudge kicked the QRF room's door open so hard it practically came off its hinges. His face was puce with rage. Not only had the woman of his dreams just disappeared in a puff of electronic smoke, but he'd got nothing planned for his R&R any more – and he was the laughing stock of the whole platoon. He went crazy.

'You fucking
cunts
! I can't fucking believe you fucking did that to me! You
fucking mean bastards
. That's sick, that is. I really fucking liked her, you know!'

'Er, yeah, we know, Smudge. We were on the other end, remember. Look, relax. It was only a joke . . .'

But Smudge was gone. He kicked the iron bunk beds, stamped a wooden chair to bits and repeatedly punched the walls. Then he ran out into Cimic's garden, where he sat for an awful long time, until his transport arrived to Slipper City and the flight home. He was truly heartbroken.

When Smudge came back from R&R two weeks later, he'd relaxed a bit. He never really saw the funny side of the joke, but at least he'd stopped breaking things whenever Natalie was mentioned. It also helped considerably that, despite his terrible grief, he'd also managed to pull a half-decent bird while he was on leave.

More importantly, he brought back with him an update from the hospitals in the UK on all the serious casualties we had suffered.

Private Beharry had been downgraded from VSI (very seriously ill) to just SI. That meant there was a decent chance he'd live, but nobody knew in what state yet.

Adam Llewellyn, who got petrol bombed, was going to be OK too. He was having skin grafts. Baz Bliss, who took a slug in the lung, had lost a lot of weight but was doing well too, and Kev Phillips, who got shot in the neck with the CO on 18 April, was shaping up the best of all. The nutter had even already got a tattoo of the words 'entry' by the scar on his neck where the bullet went in, and 'exit' over the scar on his shoulder where the round had left his body.

Pikey also went away for R&R around the same time. He hadn't pulled, but he was just as chuffed because he'd had a decent pub fight instead. True to form, he'd also managed to lug back with him seventy-five trendy shirts, the sort of things you'd wear to a glitzy party. He just couldn't help himself.

'What are you going to do with that lot, Pikey?' I asked. 'This is the desert you know. There isn't a nightclub in 500 miles. Nobody's going to buy them here, you fool!'

Pikey knew better. 'Ah, well, we'll see about that, Danny. You want one yourself? Lovely quality, look, just feel that will ya?'

He'd correctly worked out that here we were, a lot of very bored blokes in the middle of nowhere, with not a bloody thing to spend our money on. Given a chance at a bit of consumerism, we'd all tear his arm off. We did. He'd flogged the lot within two days. To my utter shame, I ended up buying one too.

We'd do literally anything to relieve the boredom. Sam even proposed a day-long wank-athon competition against Longy. Sam never got close. He readily conceded at lunch-time when Longy was already four ahead.

A better idea someone else had was to get the compound's swimming pool up and running again. It had taken a fair few bits of shrapnel but no direct hits, so the lining was sealed up pretty quickly. A hose was found, the pump was fixed, and it was filled full of river water treated by the onsite plant.

By mid-July, four weeks into the ceasefire, it was ready for use again.

A rare day off was declared to celebrate its opening day, a Friday. Almost the whole company flocked to it for a cooling dip and a bit of sunbathing. Its reappearance spread a coltish, holiday atmosphere around the camp. It was a novelty, something different to break up the routine. The only important thing was not to look too closely at the colour of the water.

'Faarkin' 'ell, Danny, this could be the Algarve,' said Dale,
as he spread his not inconsiderable girth down on his towel. 'Fetch us a Pina Colada will you, mate?'

'More like Butlins from the 1950s, I'd say. We all look the bleeding same!'

Swimming trunks hadn't been on the official kit lists. All we had to sunbathe in were our identical dark blue, tight-fitting regimental running shorts. Pants were banned for hygiene reasons.

'Yeah, check out the T-shirt tans too, Danny. Good job there's no birds here, we'd all get dumped on the spot.'

All around the pool was a mass of dark brown faces and arms with lilywhite legs and torsos. Dale was right, it wasn't pretty.

Then suddenly a commotion in the deep end.

'Oh, Jesus! You horrible little beast,' someone hollered.

The spectacle was a novelty for Tigris too. In her uncontrollable excitement, she'd taken a long run up and hurled herself in, peeing wildly as she flew through the air.

I tried to use some of the long days of inactivity to catch up on my platoon commander's paperwork. There was a mountain of admin I had to go through, that stemmed all the way back to April when we'd first arrived, almost four months before.

I had to write an annual review report for every platoon member, which meant interviewing them all. How were they finding life? What courses did they want to do? All that sort of stuff. It felt a bit demeaning having to put them all through that, when we'd been through so much together and I knew them all inside out anyway.

The only personnel problem the platoon really had was Gilly. Before the ceasefire, I'd hoped in vain that he'd find his fighting feet sooner or later. He never did. He hadn't
got any worse, which quite frankly would have been hard anyway. He was just Gilly, a completely useless bastard.

A few of the NCOs had come up to me to say he wasn't very comfortable with his weapon, and wasn't backing people up enough during contacts.

Now I had the chance to actually go through the ammo lists to see how bad he was. When I did, I was gobsmacked. There it was in black and white for every single week: rounds redistributed to Gilly, zero. We'd been through all of that, and he hadn't fired a single solitary shot.

That was it. I resolved to get rid of him as soon as I could. He was one giant waste of space. Worse than that, he was a fucking liability. If the man next to you isn't covering your arse when you ask him to because he's too concerned about keeping his own head down, you're going to get killed.

The perfect opportunity arose a couple of weeks later. During an O Group, Major Featherstone read out a request the company had received to provide two soldiers to escort the Ammunition Technical Officer (ATO) about the desert to blow up old ordnance. In civvy speak, that means the bomb squad to get rid of old artillery shells and the like.

Before the OC had even finishing speaking, I had my hand up.

'It'll be hard, sir, but Sniper Platoon can volunteer one.'

It was also a good way of getting rid of Gilly without causing too much of a stir, and he didn't lose any face with it either. He wasn't a bad person and I didn't want to shred what little confidence he had left if I didn't have to. I took him aside that night.

'Gilly, I've got some good news for you, mate.'

'OK, Sarge.'

'You've been selected for a good job away from the
platoon and the company. It's based back in Abu Napa, and I think you'll like that too. You're going to be escorting the ATO on all his duties.'

'Right, Sarge.'

It wasn't the reaction I'd been expecting. ATO meant big bangs, and Gilly didn't like those either. I tried another tack.

'Gilly, do you know what corps the ATO is in?'

'No, Sergeant.'

'I didn't think so. It's the Royal Logistics Corps.'

He still looked blank.

'It's the RLCs, isn't it, Gilly!'

His face lit up. 'Oh, really? Oh, thanks very much, Sarge. When can I go?'

Being scared of combat wasn't Gilly's fault, because warfare is not for everybody. I wasn't pissed off with him for not liking war. I was pissed off with him for taking the Queen's shilling while thinking he'd never have to see it.

The heat and the boredom had a predictable effect on Louey and his arch foe.

With little else to worry about, Louey had too much time on his hands to remember how John Wedlock had punched him in the cookhouse. He had been brooding over it for weeks. He'd given his fair share back of course, but it was the initial blow to his dignity that really infuriated the normally gentle giant. Whenever anyone asked him about it, Louey would just reply: 'He was wrong to go for me like that. Wrong.'

Hearing that Wedlock had been bad mouthing him over lunch one day finally pushed Louey over the edge.

'That's it,' he quietly announced, as he got up and walked over to the cookhouse.

Wedlock was still at his table with his back to the door,
so he didn't see Louey walk in. That was unfortunate for Wedlock, because Louey calmly strolled up to the hot plates, picked up an industrial size frying pan almost empty of paella, and charged Wedlock straight through a corridor of khaki bodies sitting down eating their scoff.

Wedlock barely had time to stand up before Louey wrapped the frying pan right around the back of his head with a dull metallic thud. Everyone knew what to do now. The cookhouse immediately erupted into two cheering mobs each backing their own prize fighter – Recce screaming for Wedlock, Snipers screaming for Louey. The neutrals just screamed.

Wedlock went down like a sack of spuds from the almighty blow. Louey was straight on top of him, and gave him two massive haymakers in the face.

'That's for last time, Wedlock, you Fijian piece of shit.'

Once the Fijian had literally realized what had hit him, he began to fight back. The frying pan blow was enough to kill most men, let alone the horrendous punches. But Wedlock seemed undamaged. In a righteous rage now, he managed to turn Louey over as the two interlocked in a very uncomfortable looking bear hug. For a few seconds, Wedlock was again on top, and hit Louey hard in the face, before they were rolling over again. After several more blows from each, the fight drew to a standstill with both men pinning all of the other's limbs down on the floor in two of the world's most unorthodox wrestling positions.

Afterwards there were the usual black eyes on the baker's dozen that were brave enough to separate them. It was another trip to Dale for Louey and Wedlock and a major bollocking, along with a hefty fine this time too. As far as Louey was concerned, it was worth every penny. Honour was even.

As it was so quiet, the battle group also introduced three-day mini-breaks for us in Kuwait. They were known as Operational Stand Down (OSD) packages. It was a good idea, because it allowed us to get a much needed change of scene. By the end of July, we'd done more than six weeks of peace in Iraq's brave new world – and we were crawling up Cimic's walls.

Rather than going en masse, each platoon from Y Company would send a fire team of four blokes on each trip, so there would never be a manpower shortage for any specialism. My turn came on 29 July, and I went with Fitz, Des and Oost.

It was a four-hour drive to Kuwait, and we travelled down in a convoy of Snatch Land Rovers. It was a tense drive, as Route 6 still had a high roadside bomb threat. Again, old habits died hard for the more fanatical of Moqtada al-Sadr's followers.

As we passed through the veritable dump of a city that is Basra, to our eyes it was a thriving modern metropolis. We had got too used to shitty, sleepy Al Amarah. However, it was absolutely nothing compared to the extraordinary experience of crossing the border.